Contrary to the arbitrary date above, everyone knows it’s really Tishri 4, 5772. For those of you who are thinking, ‘whoa…but wasn’t Thursday Rosh Hashannah, and isn’t Nissan the first month of the Jewish calendar?’ Quite true, but don’t get your tfillin in a bunch. Someone much sager than you or I must have realized that it’s just luckier to start off the year in the seventh month. I don’t think this has empirical proof, (like dropping something from the leaning tower), but it should be noted that people in authority have been making nonsensical policy for nearly 6,000 years, (much longer if you believe the 50,000-year-old cave painting mandating ‘no farting on the full moon!’).

Chronological indicators aside, the up-to-the-minute report on human progress is this:

• We are devoid of purpose or leadership. Everything playing out in the name of policy, or reform has been reduced to school yard bickering, some tragically escalating to bloody violence. We are not facing our problems of any size or import with purity of intent or regard for humanity.
• Our lives are manipulated in every way by a mysterious cadre of the gargantuanly wealthy whose lust and greed have shown little or no regard for the other 99% of the population. Personified by banks and investment brokers and driven by light-speed-fast super computers, these uncaring and unregulated morons have brought the world to its knees; moronic because, in their pursuit of all of the marbles, they have missed the obvious truth: If you destroy the world, you shouldn’t be on it at the time.
• The rest of us have taken too long to care. A few hundred people in Zuccotti Park , “Occupying Wall St.”, is having about as much impact as attacking a bed bug infestation with Raid©. Brokers merely stroll through the park in their $10K suits and smile knowingly that the newly imposed fees on debit cards, (giving us the privilege to use our own money), will far outweigh the loss by new regulation on vendor charges. They snicker, realizing that mortgage reform, resulting from the usurious chaos they created, also has an enormous upside to their bottom line, and, by the way, they’re simply too big to fail.
• What’s up with Ashton Kutcher?
• Money is the distraction, but religious fanaticism and overzealous nationalism will be our undoing. For at least 5,772 years we have been playing “My God’s Better Than Your God” and more recently that “USA…USA…” taunting nonsense, but now the swords are big enough to to take us all out, which, ironically enough, would return control of the planet to the bed bugs. Call me crazy, but as a precaution, please, no farting on the full moon!